Question

I have several UIButtons on a UIScrollView. I want the buttons to have rounded corners, so I call maskToBounds: on each of them. When I do this and run on the device, the scrolling framerate is pretty bad (it works fine on the simulator). Any ideas on a workaround for this problem?

Answer 1

You’re causing the view to be composited offscreen with that call to masksToBounds:, which slows things down quite a bit. Are you rendering custom button images? If so use UIImage -stretchableImageWithLeftCapWidth:topCapHeight: with an image which is the minimum width to encompass it’s rounded edges. This allows the GPU to handle stretching the image in the most efficient way possible, while still giving you a button made out of an image. There is a session in the WWDC 2011 videos on Drawing in UIKit – watch that, as it addresses exactly this problem, and a few others you’re likely to have.

A few alternative methods:

• Tweeties implementation of fast scrolling, by drawing everything manually
• Matt Gallaghers implementation of custom drawing. This is the method I use, as it’s easy to maintain